Back in 1999, Wall Street lost its collective mind over the internet. Companies with no revenue were suddenly worth billions, “eyeballs” were treated as currency, and market analysts predicted a frictionless future where everything would be digital. Then the bubble burst. Between March 2000 and October 2002, an estimated five trillion dollars in market value vanished into thin air.
Today, it is happening again. This time, the magic word is not “.com.” It is “AI.”
According to Torsten Slok, the influential chief economist at Apollo Global Management, a major global investment firm, the current AI driven market bubble is even more stretched than the dot com frenzy of the late 1990s. And he has the data to prove it.
“The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s,” Slok wrote in a recent research note that was widely shared across social media and financial circles.
The Chart That Should Worry Everyone
The chart from Apollo compares the 12 month forward price to earnings (P/E) ratios of the top ten companies in the S&P 500 against the rest of the index. In plain English, a P/E ratio measures how expensive a stock is by comparing its price to its profits. A high P/E ratio means investors are paying a premium and are betting on strong future growth.
Slok’s chart reveals something stunning: in 2025, the P/E ratios of the top ten companies are even higher than they were at the absolute peak of the dot com bubble in 2000.
Torsten Slok: "The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s" pic.twitter.com/OEervHU4WG — zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 16, 2025
This means investors are betting so aggressively on AI giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Google that their stock prices have become detached from their actual earnings, even more so than tech darlings like Cisco and AOL were in the nineties. The top 10 companies driving this frenzy, which hold the most significant market value on Wall Street, include tech titans like Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta. It is a super concentrated AI frenzy that is pushing a handful of mega cap stocks into nosebleed territory.
A Narrow Rally Lifting the World
... continue reading